An excessive focus on systems, policy, and performance without talking about the people involved can exclude, undermine, and disillusion those we want to bring about change in the NHS, says […]
Latest articles
Richard Smith: The ways in which hospitals can destroy health
Spending more and more on hospital care, means that you “crowd out” spending on other activities that do much for health, says Richard Smith. […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—27 February 2017
NEJM 23 Feb 2017 Vol 376 Kallikrein rises from the footnotes The curious word “kallikrein” first appeared in 1934, when Eugen Werle discovered an inflammatory chemical in plasma which he […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Fake illnesses
Fake news is in the news. So what about fake illnesses? When Richard Asher described “a common syndrome, which most doctors have seen, but about which little has been written”, […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: It’s a pain
It is not just medical authors who use metaphors. It is not just in medical writing that we find them. We—doctors and patients—use them every day. Can you describe the […]
Sian Griffiths: Inequality matters
Reducing health inequalities, even in affluent areas, needs to be a priority for government and society, say Sian Griffiths and colleagues […]
David Kerr: Health professionals’ selective mutism about research discrimination
President Donald Trump touched a raw nerve with the executive order to ban, temporarily, visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Amid the wide global outcry, there were also calls from international clinicians […]
Richard Smith: Dumfries and Galloway NHS 9: Information technology—from black hole to the best in Scotland
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature […]
Richard Lehman: Advance decisions—unthinkable thoughts and evidence
Doctors see people die, often in circumstances that they would wish to avoid for themselves. Dying is a part of daily life on stroke wards, major trauma units, elderly care […]
Matthias Wienold: Counting chronic pain
Months of pain makes it chronic. Anything else is considered acute. That’s about the extent of the definition given in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10). […]